Criticizing a David Lynch film for a lack of narrative
logic has always been a pointless exercise, and his latest film, Mulholland
Drive, spirals ever further out into the dream world Lynch has inhabited
since Eraserhead.

In the first scenes of Mulholland Drive, we meet
a young woman (Laura Elena Harring) suffering from amnesia after a car
accident on the street of the title. We’ll know her as Rita for much of
the film, though her name and identity are merely the first in a barrage
of red herrings Lynch uses to unhinge his double-jointed plotline. Shortly
afterwards, we meet Betty, the kind of preternatual innocent (from small
town Ontario, no less!) that Lynch loves to brutalize.

Yet even Betty (played by Naomi Watts with more subtlety
than we’re used to in a Lynch film) is not what she seems, and by the time
we’ve met the incompetent hired killer, the powerful and vindictive dwarf,
the witch in the upstairs apartment, and the hideously scorched homeless
man, it’s to be assumed that the film will end in a very different place
from where it started.

For the first hour or so, it’s easy to resist entering
Lynch’s world, since, typically, most of his characters are motivated by
near-hysterical extremes of naivete, anxiety, perversity or sheer evil.
In Lynch’s more successful films -- Blue Velvet, principally --
you’re drawn in, seduced by his striking imagery and compelling strangeness.
In his failures -- Wild at Heart and Lost Highway come to
mind -- it’s all just so much stately psychopathic playacting.

Thankfully, Mulholland Drive is closer to the former
than the latter. At the point where the story we’ve been following with
increasing dread suddenly and vertiginously implodes -- you’ll know it
when it happens -- the viewer will be tempted to try and tie all the loose
ends together, in much the same way that this year’s art house hit, Memento,
has prompted repeated viewings and interminable online speculation. Be
advised, though, that it’s a pointless exercise with Lynch’s film, much
as trying to re-tell your dreams, even minutes after waking, is ridiculous
and diminishing.